WYTHEVILLE, Virginia (AOA) -- It was the seventh inning stretch of a home game for the Wytheville Statesmen, the Class D League team beloved by this baseball-obsessed Southwestern Virginia town. The date was June 30, 1950.

The announcer told the crowd that Johnny Seccafico, infant son of second baseman Jim Seccafico, had been rushed to the hospital in Roanoke, seriously ill. (How serious can be measured in miles away: 78.) The fans passed a Statesmen hat and chipped in $227, a generous gesture worth ten times as much in today's dollars. Jim, who looks heartbreakingly young in this photo, was not in the game that night. He never played again.

Johnny had polio, the first case in town that summer, and his father instantly dropped the itinerant life of a D Leaguer to help care for him; Johnny lived. He never walked again.

Before it was over that summer, Wytheville – pronounced WITH-ville, pop. 5,500 – and Wythe County suffered an outbreak of poliomyelitis that struck nearly 200, killing 17, almost all of them children. Per capita, Wytheville remains the worst polio outbreak anywhere, ever.

Why? That was the question on my mind last month when I stopped off for a day in this town in the Blue Ridge just off Interstate 81, on my way back from a camping trip in North Carolina. I’ve learned over the years that the most extreme example of a phenomenon – the first cases of autism, for example, or the worst cases of Freud’s hysteria, or the fatal version of syphilis – can be the most revealing. It’s what Mark Blaxill and I have been doing for a decade now. (Another thing I've learned is to try to visit places I'm writing about -- walking the territory, as one editor put it to me.)

In the case of polio, we concluded a few years back that outbreaks were not as simple as they seemed: a toxic co-factor is required to turn harmless poliovirus infections into poliomyelitis, the illness that attacks the anterior horn cells at the top of the spine and causes paralysis and death. The earliest co-factor, we proposed, was the pesticide lead arsenate; its invention in 1892 ushered in the Age of Polio. Arsenic can weaken the immune system and cause permeability in the GI tract and, we suspect, allow the virus to escape into the nerves and cause paraIysis. Lead, too, is infamous for causing both mental and physical handicaps including paralysis. A handful of medical mavericks have long argued so-called"polio" is just lead arsenate or DDT poisoning in disguise. Our equation is new: virus + toxin = poliomyelitis.

While polio may seem like old news, it’s not. Efforts to eradicate it have made a lot of progress but are still struggling in Africa and South Asia. Mark and I were the first to report recently that a strange new “polio-like illness,” identified in 2014, is back; the Washington Post published a long article in its print edition Friday. One of the victims in the Post report is a child from Chesterfield County, Virginia, which as the name suggests is a major tobacco-growing region. A lot of these new cases are occurring in agricultural areas –- pesticide country -- and the fact that the Chesterfield case is from Virginia, where I live, feels awfully close to home. It reminded me of my Wytheville visit.

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When I drove into Wytheville last month I was intrigued to learn that Edith Boling, Woodrow Wilson’s wife, was born in a home on Main Street; after her husband’s stroke she wielded more power in the White House than any woman until, possibly, next year. An eatery occupies part of the place she grew up as one of 11 children. I sat at the counter and had sweet tea and a tasty hot dog that, beneath the fixins’, was bright red. I almost had another but decided to get going.

I love reporting in small towns, both for the local flavor and because I come from one. There is usually no security to get through, no deputy assistant secretary in charge of thwarting the media, fewer people burned by previous encounters with reporters, and fewer opportunities to get lost. I spent time at the library – where I always start – as well as the town hall, the community college, a couple of shops whose owners gave me useful background, and finally a spring in the woods outside town. Getting lost a couple of times on the alleged "loop trail" did not dilute the charm.

At the college, I looked through letters Wytheville’s mayor, William Arthur, received during that terrible summer of 1950. I stopped on this one, poorly written but pretty interesting: “I read in papers your town and county having polo or infantil parlyses,” it began. “Also same county and town are in agriculture district. Arsenic of lead spray or lead on vegetables or fruit will get into water in all shapes and manner.” The writer, Thomas Andrew Lyons of South Norwalk, Connecticut, offered a simple test. “The presence of lead in water may be easily demonstrated. Sulpheretted hydrogen [can be put] through a deep column of the acidified water and noticing whether the liquid becomes tinged of a brown color owing to the formation of lead sulphide.

"Water will dissolve lead but will not lose its poisonous effect. Taking in minute quantities it will hold on to tissues of persons causing paralysis especially of arms and of younger persons -- what I mean that enough of it could get back together and be drank -- so as to cause said disease at once."

Although the mayor routinely responded to letters, I did not come across one for this.

Lead arsenate, of course, fit our theory exactly. But given the mountainous setting of Wytheville, why would a pesticide create such an outsize epidemic now, in this place, even as it quickly declined in favor of that postwar wonder worker DDT? It was plausible but didn't really jump out at me in bright red.

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I scrolled through the Southwest Virginia Enterprise on microfilm starting early in the plague year. It made sense to me that Johnny Seccafico would have been the first to get polio. I imagined his father traveling from small town to small town in Virginia, mingling with crowds and kids and picking up the virus; maybe the family went with him to a nearby game and Johnny caught it directly. (In a small moment of synchronicity, I read that Jim Seccafico was from Brooklyn, the site of my first deep dive into epidemics.)

But what caused the outbreak to spread with such intensity through Wytheville and surroundings? The CDC was called in but found nothing unique or out of the ordinary. Still, the town fathers sprayed a fog of DDT through the town. ("Gigantic spraying program is inaugurated," the paper reported July 25, well after the epidemic began. It didn't seem to have an effect.)

As I zipped through those summer days, feeling the poignancy of ordinary life in the light of what was to come, my eye landed on a front-page piece from June 23, just days before the epidemic announced itself. The article, below, took note that the town swimming pool was still not full. (What are tax dollars for if not to drop the kids off at the municipal pool all day?) The Town manager explained: “For the past several weeks, the maximum amount available from the [present] source has been delivered to the Town; pumping has been on a 24-hour basis and pumping has not ceased for any reason. The difficulty lies in the fact that the one-half million gallons per day which is being delivered is not sufficient to meet the needs of the town during drier hot periods.

“There has been some delay in filling the swimming pool as doing so would have lowered the water in the reservoir below a safe level [for fire protection and so on]. The cooler weather this week has reduced the water consumption in the town to some degree and it is believed the pool can be completely filled by Friday or Saturday this week.” Before long, it added, a new water source currently being connected would solve the problem permanently.

The newspaper is dated Friday, June 23, 1950, so the pool would presumably have been filled that same weekend. Sometime the following week, the second baseman’s son developed polio.

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This scenario was starting to sound familiar. Poliomyelitis 0utbreaks were often observed to occur along with droughts. Rivers ran low. And swimming pools were prime suspects in those peak polio years – lots of older baby boomers remember pools closing. City fathers took no chances. The Wytheville pool, barely open, closed by July 11. (The pool was segregated, but one African-American child was diagnosed with polio right after swimming in a Marine landing craft filled with water that served as an alternative.) Stevan Jackson, author of the best history of the epidemic, A Summer Without Children, noted the Wytheville water supply had been doused with so much chlorine that tap water "reeked" of it.

“One of the first rumors was that the water supply might somehow be contaminated,” Jackson wrote. “But that didn’t exactly jibe with the facts because people in the county were not using town water, so that wouldn’t have been an explanation.” I'm always interested in what real people -- not the experts -- say, and I find that rumor fascinating. Where did it come from? Because what if it was the water, but the water was a vector for the toxin rather than the virus? That could explain a lot.

But the question remained: In that scenario, what was the toxin? As I was about to head out of town I glanced up at the flea-market banner across Main Street. What I saw made me get out of my car and keep going.

Dan, you were wondering about DDT toxicity. The following quote appears in Biskind's document as he attempted to warn of DDT:

"Despite the fact that DDT is a highly lethal poison for all species of animals, the myth has become prevalent among the general population that it is safe for man in virtually any quantity.

Not only is it used in households with reckless abandon, so that sprays and aerosols are inhaled, the solutions are permitted to contaminate the skin, bedding and other textiles are saturated, and food and food utensils are contaminated, but DDT is also widely used in restaurants and food processing establishments and as an insecticide on crops.

Cattle, sheep and other food animals are extensively dusted with it and large areas are indiscriminately sprayed from airplanes for mosquito control. DDT is difficult and usually completely impossible to remove from contaminated foods (it is not affected by cooking), and it accumulates in the fat and appears in the milk of animals who feed on sprayed pasture or on contaminated fodder or who lick the DDT from their hides. As DDT is a cumulative poison (in animals repeated small doses are as lethal as single large ones) it is inevitable that large scale intoxication of the American population would occur.”

But even they say:
"Generally speaking, the lowest dose which produced some casualties was about half to two-thirds-that of the LD50. Even so, it is apparent that the toxicity of DDT when given in solution by various routes as single doses is not high."

In their studies, animals and humans were exposed to DDT in single and repeated doses using various routes, including mists, impregnated cloth against shaved skin, oral administration, subcutaneous and intramuscular injection. First signs of intoxication from large single doses appeared after 12 to 24 hours. Notice the effects they see in animals leading up to the LD50:

“The animal is cold to the ouch, its fur is ruffled and diarrheoa may be present. It seems to be nervous and very sensitive to stimuli. Muscular weakness sets in about this time, starting in the muscles of the back and soon involving the hind limbs. Fine and then course tremors develop in these regions, the animal shaking violently for hours on end. Movement becomes restricted staggering, often spastic.

The forelimbs are seldom affected, so that the animal can partly support itself or even drag its immobile hind quarters about. Anorexia leads to a rapid loss of body weight.

Death may occur 24 to 48 hours or be delayed for several days. Respiration fails, but the heart continues to beat until the end and sometimes for a few minutes after breathing ceases. Convulsions are rare. In animals that recover, nervous and muscular signs may develop and last for some days eventually disappearing without apparent aftereffects. No evidence of permanent damage has been seen in such cases.”

DDT can cause paralysis in animals.

Since DDT accumulates in animal and human tissue it could have contributed to the overall toxic load still contributing the polio cases.

However, given the date of the spraying (1955), the peak number of cases had already occurred (1953/54). The peak may have been caused, as ATSC points out, by reclassification or because all epidemics eventually burn themselves out or because there was less DDT use across the country — it’s impossible to know now because they changed the diagnosis right at this time.

The question is how many of those clinically diagnosed cases would have been discarded if the outbreak had occurred in 1955 after the change in the diagnostic criteria?

In 1950 everyone was on the lookout for symptoms of polio, but how many of the cases had non-paralytic polio and how many had paralysis lasting for more than 60 days? Do we know?

From Anne Crockett-Stark's account, she, aged 8, and her sister went to watch Jim Seccafico's baby the day before her brother aged 9 got sick. She says, "Neither of us got sick but Sonny got it". (1)

Another anecdote, my elderly neighbour had nine siblings but only his youngest brother developed paralysis at age four in the early 1950s. This is why blaming a virus for a condition which is benign in most cases and seemingly causes paralysis at random has never made any sense to me and, if the poliovirus has anything to do with it, other factors must have played a large part. Diet, exposure to pesticides, toxins, as you say, or tonsilectomies which were commonplace in those days. (2)

What made Sonny Crockett vulnerable to sickness and paralytic disease when his sisters were not? Was the poliovirus to blame for his paralysis or the doctors treating his symptoms?

Apart from lumbar punctures for diagnosis, what did doctors do for patients with symptoms of polio, both non-paralytic and paralytic? They gave them all kinds of injections: intraspinal injections of horse serum and/or human serum, and "deep intramuscular injections of strychnine (given as a tonic) were given three times a day on alternate days". (3)

Wikipedia tells us that Strychnine is a pesticide that "has no known medicinal effects" but "in the past the convulsant effect was believed to be beneficial in small doses". (4)

Then, additionally, there's surgery and the immobilistaion of limbs in plaster casts, or strapped to Bradford frames for up to two years. (5)

Was this wise when muscle atrophy was sure to follow? Could more people have been saved from a lifetime of being lame or crippled if their immune systems had been supported when they were sick, and without the meddling of doctors?

"The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) rather than suspected poliomyelitis should be the object of surveillance as the eradication of poliomyelitis comes closer"

Even in countries like New Zealand where AFP cases are available (between 7 and 14 per year), the percentage with stool tests are minimal. Perhaps doctors don't think testing is necessary because either the cases have been vaccinated and can't have polio, or they think "We don't have polio here".

Similar to Dan having read somewhere about chlorine/pool reaction prior to autism, I've read about stated reactions to fluoride in water causing pain/head banging/insomnia in children with autism just from showering in it (which I guess could include fumes.) I suppose chlorine is probably also present in the same waters that would be fluorinated.
Lead, arsenic, chlorine, fluoride, ddt, etc - all potentially present in water at different times for different reasons. Makes you 1. want to drink water only after you've filtered it somehow and 2. cry at the possibility of all the iatrogenic damage caused by vaccines that may have been for lack of clean water and knowledge of how our epithelial linings and microbes work in the presence of toxins and heavy metals.
Does the CDC track paralysis numbers from all sources, or just "polio" and "polio-like enteroviruses."

Fortunately, heavy metal / neurotoxin handheld detection technology is on the horizon. It will probably first be marketed to third world countries.

ATSC i know little about this aspect but it does seem like it could trigger paralysis. it reminds me of provocation polio though not quite the same mechanism. the question is whether it would be enough to explain an outbreak ... best dan.

Some times as a school teacher I would come in early and spray and wipe off the student's desk with water and bleach.

I found that some kids were as they called it ; allergic to it. They said they were, I will have to take their word for it cause I did not see the usual stuffy nose, itchy eyes, or coughing. But I have seen some kids so allergic to everything that I took it seriously and sooo I did it after school fpr then on.

Some times though they put too much chorine in the water - as a class trip I went on with my daughter up to Deer Park, Michigan. The kids were the most excited about a big indoor pool at the Motel that turned out to be way to chlorinated that it choked the air. Some went swimming anyway - but not for long. I could see why a child would scream in such water. It burns the eyes, and lungs.

.Mostly though when it comes to over chlorinating - you would worry the most about the chorine corroding the pipes, and I was surprised in my readings that lead pipes are used every where and often. What kept them safe was the coatings laid down inside them .

http://www.diagnosisms.com/2012/08/04/lumbar-puncture/
"Lumbar Puncture Risks
Headache And Nausea – Headache and nausea are common. Drink plenty of fluids and use an analgesic.
CSF Leak – Occasionally spinal fluid may continue to drip out, causing a headache when you sit up. Bedrest is most commonly used to treat this, although an epidural blood patch is sometimes used (your own blood is injected into the leak site to form a clot)
Trauma – Trauma to the spinal cord or spinal nerve roots can cause weakness, loss of sensation, or paraplegia. This is extremely rare.
Infection – The risk of infection is extremely low.
Adhesive Arachnoiditis – This is extremely rare. "

http://www.cofwa.org/Arachnoiditis.htm"Adhesive Arachnoiditis <\b>
SYMPTOMS: AA does not have a typical clinical presentation, although there are a number of features, which are common in people with the condition. However, the picture is somewhat complicated by the fact that the symptoms of AA occur against a backdrop of the original spinal problem for which invasive procedures were undertaken (except in a small minority in which no spinal condition has occurred, for instance, in AA secondary to epidural anaesthesia in childbirth).

In 1999, a global postal survey of people with arachnoiditis showed the following results:

From Annual of the Universal Medical Sciences and Analytical Index [google books]:
Case of little girl who suffered paralysis due to lead poisoning after sleeping in a freshly-painted bed.
Case of alcohol, tobacco, and lead toxemia. Paralysis of lower limbs.
Case of a little girl aged 10.5 years and her two brothers, age 3 and 6. Symptoms those of poliomyelitis.

It's informative as to all the toxic exposures everybody has mentioned, and certainly there have been countless millions of victims. But, these many "insults" (lead, etc.) to babies/infants are conjectural and difficult to in down as to everyday exposure.

My point being:. Today, jn the U.S. we are INJECTING 30+ vaccines into infants by age 6 months (including the mother with her vaccinations), with all their toxic excipients AND contaminants.

Today's vaccine injections are like Atomic Bombs compared to all other everyday toxicities such as lead that are - to varying extents - buffered, but certainly consequential - adding to the toxic horror upon us.

I'll look at chlorine -- John stone also sent me some material offline about it. I keep thinking I have read something about chlorine and autism but I can't find it. Also I had a doctor in Mayer eisensteins office years ago tell me of a child who started screaming in the pool, got sick and developed autism from there ... Something is going on with that and it can't be dismissed as a myth... Dan

Dan,
All the chlorination, drinking water and swimming pool, could be a factor too. Unrecognized interference with the microbiome and environmental microbial balance. When did chlorination start in relation to the polio epidemics? Could be a matter of dose too. We once lived in a house that was close to the treatment plant, and our tap water stunk of chlorine. The concentration was much less farther down the line, as was explained to me by the water co. when I called to report the strong odor. A hard variable to pin down, but it could lead to something.

re comments -- the mines were indeed operating in the 1950s, i will lay that out in the future. given the interest in ddt i'll come up with the numbers of cases before and after its use in wytheville, as well as more details. but my sense was there should have been a really big increase after its use, and there wasn't. the leading alt-theory of polio is that ddt alone did it -- caused the big epidemics after world war 2, and that seems plausible enough but i haven't looked at it like mark and i have regarding lead, arsenic and lead arsenic. we need to find the pattern of ddt use and how it correlates with polio outbreaks, as well as the biological plausibility for ddt causing polio -- not just neurological problems but this precise outcome. (What is the biological plausibility, anyway? would love to hear some thoughts.) i will get the wytheville chronology and see what people think. i tend to go by what i call "visceral logic" or put another way, "there are no coincidences," which mark b often says. so to find issues with the water so big that they couldn't fill the town swimming pool made me really think hard about both the water and the pool. and it was certainly interesting to see a writer mention lead arsenate and particularly lead, without apparently getting a reply, and then see that the county has major lead mines -- i doubt lead is unrelated. this is going to strike skeptics like idle guesswork but we have quite a knowledge base we're working from now on the natural history of polio. we don't say or imply things that we don't have a real foundation of evidence for. of course, as i like to add, i could be wrong. stay tuned! dan.

"Problems caused during droughts are different. Low flows during droughts may be insufficient to adequately dilute effluents from industrial and municipal sewage-treatment plants. Flow augmentation is used on some streams during periods of low flow to improve water quality and to support aquatic life. Water quality is improved by increasing dilution and washing pollutants downstream."

This reminds me of the saying that circulates among environmentalists concerned with protecting water: Dilution is not a solution.

What would happen if there was drought in a lead mine area, leading to an increase in toxic water sources, followed by a storm that diluted/washed said toxicity downstream or away somewhere? Would that pattern mesh with a geographical increase in paralysis numbers followed by an decrease in those numbers after the storm?

All 4 entrances to wytheville were "signed" that year, recommending visitors come back the next year, helping to quarantine the area which was considered a vacation area (no polio shots yet, if I understand correctly).
But under other circumstance, what would paralysis patterns look like if vacationers were in an area drinking / playing in contaminated waters and then left to go home. Some people have said polio can fester for 6 weeks before showing itself (I don't know if that's true). But if it is, it would certainly make it hard to track a source of contamination. What were the questions epidemiologists used when coming to the area to try and figure out the source.

I can understand the assumption that DDT did not help, but can it have extended the length of an outbreak, despite any storms, in effect replacing lead as a contaminant after a storm? How long did the outbreak last?

Very interesting, Dan. While reading I was imagining what it would be like for a reporter 60 years from now to try to figure out what happened in our time from going through our newspaper/media archives. Can you imagine? LOL.

It's fascinating to be able to mentally walk through your visit and investigations in Wytheville, and disturbing numbers, and I think any working explanation for the severity of this outbreak would be of huge service to us still today.

Again with me muddy brain... I'm not certain this part is saying there was a spike in cases after July 25th or there wasn't?

("Gigantic spraying program is inaugurated," the paper reported July 25, well after the epidemic began. While some who hold the toxin theory of polio outbreaks blame DDT, at least in Wytheville it didn't seem to correlate with a spike in cases after July 25.)

I know so little about lead mining.
You never hear - that I work in the lead mines.
Maybe work in the zinc mine
But again the weather seemed to play a role, just like drought has to do with rabies. Rabies comes at the end of summer when there has been a drought.
That has been observed for a good long time. In the book "Ol'e Yeller" There was a drought before the wolf with rabies came to attack the family, and bite O'le Yeller.